Qingyan, Guiyang and on to Kaili Part 4 of China's Far Southwest

A Preserved Town, Guizhou's Modern Capital and Lunch in a Miao Village

03-Nov-2010

China

The Artfully Pickled Qing Dynasty Town of Qingyan

In the morning Mr Wu drove the two of us and local guide, 'Dylan' northeast from near Anshun towards the provincial capital of Guiyang. The mountains, now, were gentler and the largely empty motorway ran past newly harvested paddy fields. At Guiyang we turned south off the ring road, through Huaxi and on to the walled town of Qingyan.

Guizhou Province.South West China
This post is about the region around Guiyang and Kaili in central Guizhou

Chairman Mao hated Chinese architecture and had little respect for history. A 1958 survey listed 8,000 historic monuments in Beijing: Mao decided to retain 78. Today’s regime has more respect for Chinese history - and recognises how effectively such monuments separate tourists from dollars, so the greatest danger is now over-enthusiastic restoration. For a long time the same could not be said for vernacular architecture; China has many people to house and tower blocks are being thrown up in every town and city. The bulldozing of cities’ older quarters was indiscriminate, but the provision of clean, new, draught-proof apartments with running water and electricity meant there are few protests – and, anyway, it takes a brave person to protest in China. But now, several old towns are being preserved (or sometimes rebuilt) as a reminder of how life was, and as a sop to tourists.

Qingyan walled town

Qingyan, a complete Qing dynasty town, is, then, a rare survival. It may have been tarted up and turned into a tourist trap, but that is the price it has to pay.

Stone flagged streets between single storey houses

Once through the impressive town wall, we found ourselves in stone flagged streets between solidly built single storey houses with projecting eaves. If visiting Anchi had been like stepping back in time, this was like stepping into a museum gift shop. The town still has a thriving resident population, as was obvious during the school lunch hour, but most citizens make their living by selling things to tourists

School lunch hour in Qingyan

We visited a large and active Taoist temple,...

Taoist Temple, Qingyan

...peered into the fortune-teller’s offices outside......

Fortune teller, Qingyan

..... and a smaller, quieter Buddhist temple; the two Christian churches were locked.

Buddhist Temple, Qingyan

Several large houses sat in grounds beside the road. We paused in the doorway of a house once, reputedly, the home of Zhou Enlai’s father, though I have been unable to find any reference linking the family to this area.

Maybe the house of Zhou Enlai's father, maybe not

Many shops sold tourist trinkets, and those that did not sold food. The Chinese do not generally have a sweet tooth, so it was unusual to see confectionary being prepared and sold. A melange of sugar and nuts was being boiled up, poured onto tables and beaten with large wooden mallets. After cooling, the sticky, chewy slabs were perfect for removing filings from teeth.

Sugar and nuts being beaten with large wooden mallets, Qingyan

Elsewhere, smoked pork hung from frames, pigs trotters, stewed and glazed, were heaped in vats and piles of spices were laid out on tables.

Smoked pork, spices and more, Qingyan

We might have lunched at one of the many restaurants, but Dylan had other ideas.

Lunch in Huaxi

Huaxi, just far enough south of Guiyang to be considered a separate town rather than a suburb, is the home of Guizhou University, Dylan’s alma mater. Whether the restaurant he chose still doubles as a garden centre was unclear, but tables were laid out in a huge greenhouse amid trees, shrubs and gurgling water features. Despite a higher standard of cleanliness and comfort than we had become used to, the food was not special. The spicy green tofu was good, as was the bowl of bamboo served in its own steamer, but the fried pork and potatoes with a dip of what tasted remarkably like tomato ketchup was less exciting.

The Creatures we did not Eat

After eating, we wandered down to look at the seafood. The array of tanks, with price labels attached, blurred the distinction between aquarium and menu. There were fish, eels, lobsters and many crabs, including a tank full of the rather sinister Horseshoe Crabs that I had seen before only on wildlife programmes. The largest tank, too small for its occupant, held a substantial turtle. ‘For show,’ said Dylan, ‘he’s too big and old to eat’. The same did not apply to the various species of terrapin.

Several species of terrapin

One tank contained not sea creatures, but several hundred scorpions. A few scuttled about the floor, but most lay in a heap, waving their nasty little tails.

Scorpion is on the menu

Lynne and I believe that if other people think something is food, then it is arrogant to turn your nose up at it and stupid to refuse to even try it. We brought our daughter up with the same attitude, and this is her photograph of a bowl of scorpion soup, taken a couple of years ago. She sucked up the broth but when her Cantonese dining companions picked up the scorpions, broke them open and sucked out the insides, she could not bring herself to follow suit. It may go against my philosophy, but I strongly suspect I too would have quailed. I find it difficult to understand the thinking of the first person who looked at a scorpion and shouted ‘lunch’ instead of the much more sensible ‘run away’. Maybe it was desperation, but the price made it clear this is no longer food for the desperate. So why?

Scorpion soup

Guiyang, Capital of Guizhou Province

Guiyang has been described as the obscure capital of one of China’s poorest provinces. It does not feel like that when you are there. Fifty years ago it was a conglomerate of tumbledown houses, now it has enough towering buildings and complicated road systems to qualify as a thoroughly modern city with a quietly confident, almost metropolitan, air. Surrounded by mountains it is a compact and tidy city, though the mountains are reputed to concentrate the pollution. That was not a problem the day we were there.

Modern Guiyang

Mr Wu parked beside the Nanming River. Since Huanhgguoshu we had crossed a watershed; the Nanming was the first river we had encountered flowing north towards the Yangzi basin instead of south towards the South China Sea. The old centre sits beside the river and consists of two Ming pavilions and a small park. It is pleasant enough and the view of modern Guiyang upstream is impressive, but the city has little else to offer the casual visitor. Fortunately, we were only staying one night.

Old Guiyang (and young me)

That evening we walked around the block looking for somewhere to eat. Finding a restaurant in China is rarely difficult, but the usual tatty little places looked unfrequented and unappealing. Eventually we spotted a larger establishment across the road, which seemed to be bustling. Inside, we were quickly ushered to the only remaining table and were seated before we realised it was a hotpot restaurant.

Hotpot is popular in many parts of China, but remains virtually unknown in Chinese restaurants in England. The tables have a hole in the top with a gas burner beneath. A wok arrives containing stock, a few vegetables and some lumps of tofu, and is placed over the burner. There are regional variations; in Sichuan a few chillies are added (‘a few chillies’ in Sichuan means forty of fifty’) and elsewhere the pot is divided ying and yang style with spicy stock in one side and plain the other. In Guiyang it was just plain, but we were given a spicy dip if that became too boring. Choosing other ingredients from the long list presented a problem, but a young woman at the next table kindly lent us her linguistic expertise. Selecting from those items she knew the English for, we ended up with potatoes, a variety of sliced meats and some offal based meatballs. We had a good meal, but I can never entirely still the little voice telling me that it is perverse to go to a restaurant and then cook your own food.

04-Nov-2010

The Miao Village of Qangmen

Guiyang was the most northerly point of our journey, and next morning we turned southeast, heading, ultimately for Guilin in Guangxi Province.

It was a dull, cold morning and we drove along a deserted motorway through misty hills. We left the motorway at Kaili, heading away from the town before taking a narrow road into the mountains towards the Miao village of Qangmen.

On the way, we passed three people harvesting sweet potatoes in a tiny field. A man was mattocking the vegetables out of the ground, a women was cutting off the tops and stacking them for use as animal feed, and another man squatted in the mud cleaning up the potatoes and putting them in a sack. They were Miao so, naturally Dylan stopped to talk. They came, they told us, not from nearby Qangmen put from a village on the other side of the valley. When they had finished they would walk home, the heavy sacks hanging from carry poles.

Harvesting sweet potatoes

Qangmen is a 'Long-Horn' Miao village of some 1500 people. The wooden houses have animal sheds on the ground floor, with the human accommodation above being approached by a balcony. Along the balcony vegetables are hung out to dry, corncobs, chillies, rice and peanuts all twisted into decorative shapes. Like most Miao villages, Qangmen is built on a hillside, so every living room looks out over the neighbour’s roof towards the communal fields below.

...along the balcony vegetables are hung out to dry...

More than a hundred people were gathered in the central square, squatting in groups or sitting on tiny wooden stools. There had been a funeral and the mourners had gathered for a communal meal. Most of the women wore a working version of traditional dress, but all had their long hair carefully oiled and elaborately coiled, with a comb stuck in the back to keep everything in place.

...more than a hundred people gathered in the central square...

We had lunch in one of the newer wooden houses by the main road. We were greeted by two women in full ceremonial dress, long horns included, who sang a welcome and offered us a cup of rice wine.

We were greeted by two women in full ceremonial dress...

Tradition dictates that the host holds the cup while the guest leans forward and has the wine poured down their throat. Commercial rice wines can be glutinous with some not altogether wholesome flavours but this home-brew was light and clean with a pleasant balance of acidity. It was fortunate that we liked it, because once one cup had been poured down us, the rules demanded that a second went the same way.

a cup of rice wine

A wooden plaque informed us the owners were permitted to operate a tourist restaurant, albeit a restaurant with one table. There was also only one wok, but it was huge. One of them fed wood into the fire while the second poured in some oil and set about cooking our lunch. We watched her stir-fry some strips of pork before returning to the table to await our meal.

Preparing our lunch

Once the ingredients are prepared, Chinese meals are quickly cooked. Soon the table was covered with dishes; soup with tofu, spring onions with white radishes, green beans with pork, red radish strips with chillies and pork, potato strips cooked in stock, an omelette, bamboo with meat and bowls of the Miao’s favourite sticky rice.

It was a fine and filling meal

It was a fine and filling meal, briefly interrupted by more singing and more pouring of rice wine down our throats. Too often, tourists are served up a pre-packaged version of a culture on the verge of extinction. Just occasionally, in places where mass tourism has not reached, you meet people who are proud of their still living culture and are pleased to share it with you. This was one of those times and it was a thrilling and humbling experience.

We reluctantly said our goodbyes to the villagers of Qangmen...

Farewell to Qangmen

Paper Making at Shiqaio

... and a kilometre or so down the road Mr Wu stopped beside a small track heading into a valley. Dylan watered the bushes while Lynne and I walked down the track wondering what we could possibly find. Rounding a bend we came across a forest of fine meshed frames on which newly-made paper was drying. Inside the large cave beyond, three people were busy dipping more frames into vats of watery pulp. We knew we were going to see a papermaking factory, but had not expected it to be in a cave.

A forest of fine meshed frames

We watched the highly skilled, if rather repetitive, work for a while...

Paper making in a cave

....before driving on to Shiqaio, the papermaker’s village.

Main street of Shiqaio 

Along a single street of wooden houses we saw old women picking over shredded bark, an old man beating pulp with a venerable mechanical hammer, a woman painstakingly separating the wads of damp paper brought up from the cave and sticking the single sheets onto a wall to dry, and a group of women counting and smoothing out sheet after sheet of finished paper. Apart from one man threshing rice in the street and another sitting on a sofa drinking beer, everyone in Shiqaio seemed to be busy papermaking.

..beating pulp with a venerable mechanical hammer..

With no distinction between home and factory, life went on as it has for the last century or two - apart from the addition of electric lights and an outbreak of satellite dishes. At the end of the street, stuck on a wall, was the plan of new Shiqaio. It seems the government intend to demolish the village and move it to a site across the river, where it can be opened up as a tourist attraction. A pity no one had asked the locals if that was what they wanted.

new Shiqaio

Kaili

We returned to Kaili with mixed feelings. The Heaven Sent Hotel, right on the central roundabout, represented an emphatic return to the twenty first century. We checked in early enough to visit the post office - a waste of time, as they had no stamps for ‘abroad’ – and to take a stroll round the central shopping mall.

The centre of Kaili

Later, we dined at a small restaurant where they boiled up individual meals in cast iron pots over a gas brazier. It was largely noodles in tomato sauce with a couple of pieces of sausage and a meatball or two, but we had enjoyed a large lunch and 45 pence each represented a cheap diner by any standard.

China's Far South West (2010)

Part 1: Kunming and The Stone Forest
Part 2: Shilin to Xingyi
Part 3: Xingyi and on to Huangguoshu
Part 4: Qingyan, Guiyang and on to Kaili
Part 5: Kaili, Xijiang and Rongjiang
Part 6: Rongjiang, Zhaoxing and on to Guangxi
Part 7: Chengyang Dong Villages and the Longsheng Rice Terraces
Part 8: Guilin and the Li River
Part 9: Hong Kong
Part 10: Macau